A talent community is a concept that many recruiters struggle to grasp. They often confuse a talent community for the database that has been built up using many impersonal methods including the recruiting website and mail. Databases suffer from two major problems. First of all they tend to get old very quickly and the data is frequently not current and often not useable.
While no one that I know of has done actual research on the quality of the data in corporate resume databases, I know from anecdotal conversation that it is poor. The second problem is that all the recruiter knows about the candidate is what is in the resume itself. There is no additional information, no personal observations and no reference data. Because the resumes have been added mostly through impersonal methods, the candidates are unknown to the recruiters.
This means that the qualification and assessment of a candidate begins after the resume is retrieved and may take quite a bit of time assuming the candidate can even be contacted. Candidate quality is often poor and the time to find candidates can become very long, especially for hard to fill positions.
The kind of talent communities executive searchers use are almost impossible for corporate recruiters to reproduce and have limited applicability to the much broader and more varied requirements of most organizations. The talent community a good headhunter maintains may have only a few hundred (often not even that many) people in it. And, the headhunter calls or contacts the members on a very frequent basis, staying up to date on changes in address, email, education, health and so forth. Only a small number of headhunters have developed the technology that would help them build bigger communities.
What makes the talent community different in the corporate world is its ability to leverage technology to achieve similar levels of personalization.
There are three distinctive features of corporate talent communities that make them more valuable than databases.
Screens and Refers
A talent community is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information. For example, if someone comes to the recruiting web site and indicates an interest in a particular job, software can quickly assess a variety of things including aptitude for the job, interest, and skill level. People who achieve certain scores can be referred to other more suitable positions, turned away completely, or forwarded directly to a recruiter for immediate follow up. This way no one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call – which usually never comes.
This ensures that everyone who ends up in the talent community has been evaluated at some level and knows that they meet the basic requirements for employment. They have had a positive encounter, although that was entirely or almost entirely without actual contact with you or any other recruiter.
Some recruiters feel this cannot work and that candidates will either refuse to complete assessments or be turned off by the impersonal treatment. Several years of actual practice using these methods by organizations such as Chili’s Restaurants and Enterprise Rent-a-Car show that this is not the case. Candidates respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements and are often surprised to get a phone call or personal email from a recruiter because the software has alerted the recruiter to the quality of candidate.
Personal and Dynamic
Candidates actually perceive talent communities as very personal. If the talent community is set up well, candidates will frequently get emails and other messages about jobs and about the status of their own candidacy. They may receive periodic requests to update their personal information and keep their address and email current. This means that information is up-to-date. Candidates can add more information about themselves and recruiters can ask questions about specific skills or interests. All of this information is kept in the candidate record and any recruiter can access this. If a new recruiter stats recruiting for a position, there may be many candidates in the community that she can learn a lot about very quickly.
Talent communities are like living organisms. They are always changing and becoming more mature and sophisticated. Recruiters may have never met a person face-to-face and yet know much more about them than if they has had two or three personal interviews. This computer-aided interaction, as well as testing and assessment, can provide hiring managers with a very complete picture of a number of candidates.
Flexible and Higher Quality
All of this means that talent communities are far more flexible than databases. Candidates that may have applied for one position are frequently referred to different ones after the recruiter knows them better through the interaction and testing. One candidate may be an ideal candidate for several positions and fewer candidates get pigeonholed into a particular channel and thereby be missed in the search. The more vigorous and thorough screening and assessment that technology makes possible means that quality is as high as it can be and even higher than the quality that comes through employee referral or headhunters.
It is not a simple process to set up a talent community and it will take time and effort to make them effective. But the hardest part of putting in place is not the technology or the screening and assessment tools or the acceptance of the idea by candidates. What proves to always be the hurdle that is hardest to overcome is the resistance of recruiters to using the tools and embracing the concept as a way to do what they do better than ever.
